Abstract
Recent philosophical discussion of collective agency (CA) pays special attention to small-scale cases of cooperating agents: two persons going for a walk together, preparing a sauce hollandaise together, painting a house together, etc. The underlying assumption behind this focus is that a general concept of CA (which would also include large-scale cases) can and should be derived from such small-scale cases. In this paper, I argue that the choice of small-scale cooperation as a paradigmatic example of CA is problematic. It tends to make us overlook important features, which have to be taken into account when theorizing about CA in general. I develop this line of thought by critically examining the approach taken by Margaret Gilbert and also that of Scott Shapiro, who applies Michael Bratman’s account of CA to cases of what he calls ‘massively shared agency’.
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Notes
- 1.
I will try to elucidate what a ‘relevant sense’ of the term ‘group’ could be later within this paper.
- 2.
Sigmund Freud claims that we have to study the processes of interpersonal identification if we want to understand the mechanisms which underlie group formation. See Freud 1949, 70.
- 3.
See Butterfill (in this volume) for such a proposal. What Butterfill is hinting at in this context seems to me to be similar to a mechanism which the phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz calls ‘Einleibung’ (encoporation); a kind of bodily empathy or unreflective motor representation of others, which Schmitz takes to be constitutive for social interaction in general and CA in particular (Schmitz 1994).
- 4.
I would claim that this is so because in the case of a couple the shared goal (if there is one) cannot significantly differ from what the persons constituting the couple want to do. This may be a gradual difference, however, I think it is still significant enough to differentiate between couples and groups.
- 5.
However, we might well imagine a team (within a company for example, which is defined by a specific goal) composed of two individuals that is in some way indifferent towards the exchange of its members, but I claim that this case is significantly different from Gilbert standard example of two people going for a walk together.
- 6.
Raz, like Gilbert, tries to address the question in what way members of a given community are obliged to follow its rules. The point I want to express here, however, is that the “sense of belonging” does not necessarily involve a kind of commitment or obligation.
- 7.
I try to describe the way CA is shaped within social networks like Facebook and Twitter in Poljanšek (2014b).
- 8.
For further considerations concerning the importance of interfaces and the way they shape our everyday lives and social interactions see Poljanšek 2014a.
- 9.
Barry Smith recently argued that we have to take into account the role documents (like, for example, a musical score of an orchestra) play as mesh-creating mechanisms in cases of massively shared agency (Smith 2013). I think this role of documents as ‘mesh-creating’ mechanisms is even more significant in cases of long-term CA. Think just of the ongoing progress within the scientific community: Without documents laying the ground for ongoing research by comprising and stabilizing data it would be hard to imagine how it could take place at all. Here it would be especially important to take into account different kinds of ‘mesh-creating’ mechanism that enable cases of massively shared agency and long-term cases of CA. Again, I’m not able to elaborate these thoughts within this paper.
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Poljanšek, T. (2015). Choosing Appropriate Paradigmatic Examples for Understanding Collective Agency. In: Misselhorn, C. (eds) Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 122. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15515-9_10
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